Baynell had at first a certain shrinking to witness the lessons of the deaf-mute, pitying the poor deprived child, so young, so tender, so pretty, so plaintive in her infirmity, shut out from all the usual avenues of knowledge. He would take up his book and withdraw his attention. But after a time there was suddenly forced upon his observation the superior judgment and acumen and careful altruistic thought exerted in these small matters by Mrs. Gwynn. Inexpert in the manual alphabet, she wasted no time nor labor on its acquisition for herself; but, notwithstanding this, "subscraction" had no terrors for Lucille. So practised was she in the domain of demonstration that her slate was swiftly covered with figures, and her sponge had no necessity to be diverted to the incongruous function of wiping her bright eyes. All the questions were put in writing and answered by the little deaf-mute with correct spelling and a most legible and creditable chirography, over which Captain Baynell found himself exclaiming with delighted surprise, while the cheeks both of the scholar and teacher flushed with pride and gratification, as they exchanged congratulatory smiles. So far from being the sport of her limitations and humiliated by them, Lucille was pressed forward to excel, and the twins gazed upon her as a miracle of learning, and often craved the privilege of scanning her slate, and imitating the childish flourishes of her capital letters. In naught was she permitted to feel her deficiencies—so craftily tender was her preceptress. The hour which the twins devoted to playing scales on the grand piano—being snugly buttoned up in sacques to protect them from the chill of the great parlors, and often called across the hall to warm their fingers at the library fire—Lucille sat at her drawing-board, and although she had only an ordinary degree of talent, she acquired a deftness and a proficiency that made the result remarkable for a child of her age; her leisure was encouraged to express itself in sketching from nature, and she went about much of the time pleasantly engrossed, holding up a pencil at a stiff angle and at arm's-length to take accurate measurement of relative distances and details of perspective.
Baynell was a man who could be allured by a pretty face, but he could never have fallen in love with a woman merely for her beauty. He was possessed of insistent ideals, and now and then these were shattered by an evidence of Mrs. Gwynn's incongruously bitter cynicism, or a touch of repellent hardness and an icy coldness unpleasing in one so young, and all his preconceived prejudices were to adjust anew. He was beginning at last to feel that he must seek to realize her nature, rather than to fit her into the niche awaiting the conventional goddess of his fancy. She had other traits as inconsistent with her youth, her grace, her beauty, her lissome gait, her delicate hand; and these were homespun virtues, so plain, so good, so useful, so aggressive—such as one may fancy are designed to compensate the possessor for limitations in a more graceful sort,—according with an angular frame, a near-sighted vision, a rasping voice. There was scant need to look so beautiful, so daintily speculative, as she sat and cast up the judge's household accounts in a big red book that seemed full of cobweb perplexities and strenuous calculations to make both ends meet. Sometimes she brought it over to her uncle and, placing it before his reluctant gaze, pointed out some item of his own extravagance with a dignity of rebuke and a look of superior wisdom that might have realized to the imagination Minerva herself. Such a wealth of good house-keeping lore, so accurately applied, might have justified any amount of feminine ugliness.
Her tender, far-sighted, commiserative appreciation of the deaf-mute's limitations, and the simple measures that had so far nullified them and utilized all the child's capacity, were incongruous with the iron rule under which the three were held.
"I am afraid the ladies are giving you a great deal of trouble, Leonora," her uncle said one day, apologetically, when absolute mutiny seemed abroad amongst them.
"Not half so much trouble as I intend to give them," Mrs. Gwynn replied resolutely.
Their meek, mild, readjusted little faces after the scholastic hours were over were enough to move a heart of stone, and now and again Judge Roscoe glanced uneasily at them, and at last said inappropriately enough:—
"I am afraid you have not had a happy morning, ladies."
"They have been brought to hear reason," Mrs. Gwynn observed dryly. "And I have heard reason, too,—the Fourth Line of the Multiplication Table recited backward four times, standing facing the wall. It is an exercise that tends to subdue the angry passions. Allow me to commend it for general experiment."
Baynell sought to laugh the episode off genially with the "ladies," but the three little faces looked for permission to ridicule this dire experience, and as Mrs. Gwynn's countenance maintained a blank inscrutability, they did not venture to make merry over their miseries of the "Four Line," now happily overpast.
The scholastic duties were well over by noon, except perhaps for the scale-playing on the grand piano, and the "ladies" roamed at will about the house, or in the parterre if the weather were dry, or played at battledore and shuttlecock or graces in the long gallery enclosed with Venetian blinds. If it rained they were permitted to repair to the kitchen, where Aunt Chaney, a very tall, portly woman, with a stately gruffness, obviously spurious, accommodated them with bits of dough, to be moulded into ducks and pigs, and assigned them a small section of the stove whereon to bake these triumphs of the plastic art. Doll's dresses were here laundered, being washed in a small cedar noggin owned in common by the trio, and a miniature sad-iron, heated by special permission on Aunt Chaney's stove, was brought into requisition. Sometimes Aunt Chaney was in a softened mood, and fluted a ruffle on a wax baby's skirt, and told wonderful tales about Mrs. Gwynn's dresses in her girlhood, "flounced to the waist, and crimped to a charm." Thence the transition was easy to the details of her young mistress's social triumphs and celebrated beauty, with lovers in gangs, all sighing like furnaces and represented as rolling in riches and riding splendid and prancing horses, the final special zest of each story being the fruitless jealousy of the red-headed Miss Mildred Fisher, eating her heart out,—this to the immature imagination of the "ladies" literally resembled the chickens' hearts which were so daintily chopped to garnish the dish of fried pullets amidst the parsley.